Yearly Archives: 2018

Steve Lambert’s 2018 Gift Giving Guide™

For Grandma and Grandpa: A Steve Lambert print
For moms: A Steve Lambert print
For dads: A Steve Lambert print
For grads: A Steve Lambert print
For the kids: A Steve Lambert print
For your co-worker or boss: A Steve Lambert print
For the fitness lover: A Steve Lambert print
For the Millennial in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For that special someone: A Steve Lambert print
For the new Instant-Pot owner in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For the cat-lover in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For the photobug in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For the gadget lover in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For the golf lover in your life: A Steve Lambert print
For the person who has everything: A Steve Lambert print

Printed at Electric Works Press. Both are signed, numbered, limited editions, originally only made available to Kickstarter backers. Ironically, right now I’m in debt on this edition, so… you know… if that sways ya.

Now We Are Alive $100 + $10 shipping

Originally only offered on my mailing list, I now only have a few left. Signed, numbered, limited edition letterpress prints. You can pay more if you want. More info

Addendum is a browser plugin that replaces advertising images on websites with visual essays by artists. Each visual essay is a collection of 8-10 images produced by the artist or collected in the course of their research. Users will see the ads on the page they are viewing replaced by one image from the visual essay—the rest in a series. On the next page they visit, the ads will be replaced by the second image in the essay… and so on.

An Addendum is a note of omission or correction added to the end of a printed publication. And with the internet these need not be separate documents, published after the fact. Addendum allows web users to make their own corrections, by choice, updated in real time.

Currency: What do you value? is a group exhibition that asks questions about the relationship between art and money, exploring the flaws of our current economic reality. The featured artists expose the complex relationships between currency and how society values or doesn’t value art, work and time. They employ wit and satire to reveal economic inequities and dysfunctions, and ask: how do materialism and corporate interests take precedence over human and environmental concerns? How do debt and money impact art and creativity?

Literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin described the concept of the carnival as a subversive, disruptive, world-upside-down event in which the hypocrisy of everyday life was unmasked. During carnival, social structures including those that defined class and status were disrupted by common people. In Currency: What do you value?, artists turn assumptions upside down to re-examine our relationship to money and how we live our lives.

The exhibition brings together national, international and local artists who engage with these themes through a variety of media and artistic approaches. In Debtfair, Occupy Museums continues their ongoing intervention that began at Art League Houston and appeared at the Whitney Biennial in 2017. The collective asks New Mexico artists how debt affects them and their art and uses collected data to explore the real impacts of debt at a time when U.S. credit card debt alone is over one trillion dollars. Albuquerque artist Leonard Fresquez has organized The New Booleggers: Fabricating (Im)Propriety, an installation in which 20 artists explore how high-end commodities are valued and question the worth of such products by producing knock-off versions of popular items.

New York artist Evan Desmond Yee fossilizes outmoded technologies including specific Apple products. He demonstrates how these objects, that have such a hold on us, quickly lose their novelty as they become obsolete. By placing the objects in a geologic context, he also raises questions around corporate influence, environmental neglect and a future in which nature reclaims its place over technology. Mel Chin’s Fundred project is continued as an outreach program with local schools involving hand-made currency used to raise awareness about lead poisoning.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

Josie Lopez, PhD, Curator a 516 ARTS, was born and raised in Albuquerque. She received her B.A. in History and M.A. in Teaching from Brown University. She completed an M.A. in Art History at the University of New Mexico and her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include examining art as a discursive agent in the political arena, modern and contemporary Latin American art, 19th century France and Mexico, and the history of New Mexican art with a focus on printmaking. Lopez recently wrote the book The Carved Line: Block Printmaking in New Mexico and curated the accompanying exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum. Lopez has been the Jacob K. Javits Fellow and an Eleanor Tufts Fellows. She has taught courses on modern Mexico and the prints of Francisco Goya at SMU, and courses on the history of printmaking and European art at the University of New Mexico.

Manuel Montoya, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Global Structures and International Management at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management. He was born and raised in Mora, New Mexico, and received his B.A. in English Literature and Economics from the University of New Mexico. He has Master’s degrees from Oxford University and NYU as a Truman Scholar and Rhodes Scholar. He received his Ph.D. at Emory University in Foreign Relations and Comparative Literature as a George Woodruff Scholar and a UNM Center for Regional Studies Fellow. His research interests mainly focus on a concept he refers to as “global legibility,” the process whereby humans conceptualize the planet and make it a meaningful part of their realities. This work incorporates ideas drawn from studies in Global Political Economy, Emerging Markets, Creative Economy, and Critical Management Studies.

The Center for Artistic Activism conducted an Arts Action Academy in the Macedonia (former Yugoslavia) in the summer of 2018. I think this video is the best, short, summary of what a C4AA workshop is all about.

Steve Duncombe: “I am very cynical about the university as a site for radical struggle. It has amazing recuperative powers—the university can take almost anything radical: feminism, class analysis, critical race theory, and just turn it into a seminar.”

Art As Social Action An Introduction to the Principles and Practices of Teaching Social Practice Art, edited by Gregory Sholette, Chloë Bass and Social Practice Queens.

Publisher Allworth Press writes: “Art as Social Action is both a general introduction to and an illustrated, practical textbook for the field of social practice, an art medium that has been gaining popularity in the public sphere. With content arranged thematically around such topics as direct action, alternative organizing, urban imaginaries, anti-bias work, and collective learning, among others, Art as Social Action is a comprehensive manual for teachers about how to teach art as social practice.”

“Along with a series of introductions by leading social practice artists in the field, valuable lesson plans offer examples of pedagogical projects for instructors at both college and high school levels with contributions written by prominent social practice artists, teachers, and thinkers.”

Stephen Duncombe and I will be presenting at Guerilla Science 2018, “a conference for creatives who love science and scientists who love to create.”

GS2018 is a one-day conference that brings together experts from the worlds of science, design, art, theater, and activism to examine new ways of communicating, working and collaborating. Brought to you by Guerilla Science and the Pratt Institute, you’ll meet the innovative creators that inspire our unique approach to science communication.

By learning from and working with professionals in different fields, we can ensure that more people from diverse communities are empowered by science.

This print illustrates what Stephen Duncombe calls “The Jedi Mind Trick,” a story told in our C4AA workshops. This illustration is included in our forthcoming book.

The Jedi Mind Trick Frame 1

The Jedi Mind Trick Frame 2

The Jedi Mind Trick Frame 3

The Jedi Mind Trick Frame 4

The Jedi Mind Trick Frame 5

2018 C4AA Print: The Jedi Mind Trick Print by Steve Lambert

The print is made with a Risograph printer. Similar to silkscreening, riso printing enables a layering technique to produce multi-colored prints. It’s printed on high-quality Speckletone paper, the first-ever recycled sheet with flecks and “shives” created in 1955 by the French Paper Co.

On October 25, the C4AA was invited to give a talk and workshop at the Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. A C4AA Alumni, Ibrahima “Ibou” A. Niang is a current fellow and invited us to share about our research and how we train artistic activists.

From October 15-21, 2018 the Center for Artistic Activism ran a new workshop in Skpoje, Macedonia. We are working with The Contemporary Art Center and local artist organizers in how to train new, citizen, artistic activists.